Jay Harvey Upstage

Over my mostly adolescent years as an Episcopalian, I never had the opportunity of hearing the graveside liturgy that reminds us, according to the Book of Common Prayer: "In the midst of life we are in death."  Somehow I picked up that precise reminder long ago and usefully thought of those ancient words of devotion, both obvious and paradoxical as they are, while attending a performance of "Fun Home" Thursday night. The season-opening production by the Southbank Theatre Company carries the magic of charm and searing revelations as it casts an authentic aura of bitter and illuminating truth at Butler University's Shelton Auditorium . Bruce uncovers Small Alison's forbidden casket fun.   The show's title turns out to be family slang, also with a whiff of paradox, for "funeral home," the Bechdel family business in a small Pennsylvania town. In the graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel, which forms the basis of this lilting yet  profound musical by Je...

Rob Dixon holds forth in Coltrane celebration. There can be little question that the most appropriate musician to lead an Indy Jazz Fest tribute performance on the 100th anniversary of John Coltrane's birth was Rob Dixon . Jazz fans have had a few decades to appreciate the protean capabilities of the Atlanta-bred tenor   saxophonist. Dixon has been an indefatigable presence on the local music scene, earning him the description "the jazz mayor of Indianapolis." His occasional programming of Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" has cemented his connection to the master. In corporate terms, the quartet that offered two Coltrane sets Wednesday at the Jazz Kitchen   did business as the I ndianapolis Jazz Collective. The band took in as special guest Lasana D. Kazembe , a spoken-word artist who proved apt for evoking the Coltrane idealism and displaying an original, intense  manner of representing Coltrane's musical breadth through verbal spectacle. Kembe's contri...

Leah Amory was distinctive in appearance and repertoir e As the 12th Quadrennial International Violin Competition of Indianapolis advances, its launch with performances this week by all the participants may fade as the public and violinists who fall by the wayside direct attention to the survivors in the semifinals and finals. Still, music lovers who don't necessarily favor Bach over Mozart or vice versa may be stunned by the disappearance  of unaccompanied violin sonatas and partitas  by the baroque master whose output is considered foundational. In their place in the prelims is one of five sonatas for violin and piano by the late 18th-century Austrian master Mozart (or Franz Schubert's Sonatina in  D major). This decision will lend more prominence to the  focus on Mozart in the Classical Finals (Sept. 30 and Oct. 1),  where his five concertos, marvels for a 19-year-old, are in the competition repertoire. What gives? some may ask. "It's fairer to these kids to ...

Mother of them all: Jeanne Manford joins the parade. The shadow version of "coming out" turns out to have a brilliance all its own. "Everybody's  Favorite Mothers" proclaims the process in an enthralling way that  doesn't skirt the difficulties of owning sexual identity through open self-assertion and garnering the support of loved ones. In a premiere performance seen Thursday night at the Phoenix Theatre,   the audience of James Still's new play is brought into a close-up observer/participant's role centered on the emergence of gay-rights momentum and support in the 1970s. Without throwing himself into the briar patch of documentary-genre devotion, the playwright immerses us in a family story complicated by the movement's internal divisions and the unpredictable benefits of a loving ally's imaginative breakthroughs. The watchword evoked a few times in the play — "Vision without action is hallucination" — could be revised, somewhat ...

Choosing from the summit of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's operetta achievement to start Buck Creek Players ' 53rd season also confirmed the company president's personal history with "The Pirates of Penzance." Georgeanna Teipen's curtain speech Friday night set the tone for what she said was her aim in placing the work first in 2026-27 at the troupe's home on the far-southeastern side of Indianapolis. Mabel and Frederic sing of their bond, achieved with difficulty. The ensemble riches set forth in Gilbert's book and lyrics, complemented in permanent fashion by Sullivan's music, work hand-in-glove with  the broadly outlined individual vividness presented in such characters as the lovers Frederic and Mabel, the Pirate King, Major-General Stanley, the nurse Ruth, and such memorable minor characters as the Police Sergeant, who in due course reminds us that "a policeman's lot is not a happy one." The forces of law and order, and of ou...

  Blending genres to express her musical identity, Grace Kelly opened her quartet's first set Saturday night Grace Kelly holds forth at the Kitchen. with a tightly fused mini-medley of a James Bond movie tune and Billie Eilish's "No Time to Die." It was a much-anticipated return visit to the Jazz Kitchen, a club about which she expressed enthusiasm repeatedly while noting the two-night stand was the last stop on her current Midwestern-East Coast tour. Kelly, red mane waving as she acrobatically played her shiny alto sax, has increased the proportion of singing to her free-flowing instrumental prowess since I last heard her here. Remaining intact is her outspoken embrace of the audience and a knack for cultivating its heartiest responsiveness. By her encore, Huey Lewis and the News' "Power of Love," she was circulating through the dining-room audience in extended soloing on the groove-heavy tune. But she has  based her appeal increasingly on vocals, bei...